Nic, co francuskie, nie jest im obce: (niebezpieczne) związki brytyjskiego postmodernizmu z literaturą francuską

Abstract

This text is concerned with links and connections between French literature and philosophy of the post-Second-World-War period, and the British experimental novel of the 1950s and 1960s which, drawing on John Barth's diagnosis, is called here the 'literature of exhaustion' and represents the first phase of development of postmodern fiction. Its main claim is that once again in the history of the British novel, French influence saved it from parochialism resulting from a dedication to the naive realism of social observation which, according to Bernard Bergonzi and David Lodge, is a distinguishing feature of the British 'literary mind'. As a result, British fiction became capable of confronting the problems and dilemmas of the novel in the age of the fundamental crisis of all systems of authority and knowledge. Some works by such writers as Samuel Beckett, Nigel Dennis, Christina Brooke-Rose, Rayner Happenstall, Iris Murdoch, Giles Gordon, John Fowles, B. S. Johnson, Andrew Sinclair, Julian Mitchell, David Caute and John Berger are unquestionable examples of this trend. The first seven novelists in this list demonstrate and explore openly their 'French connections', finding intellectual and formal inspiration in French contemporary philosophy and literature. The essential part of this essay discusses briefly Beckett's so-called trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable) and Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman in the context of French existentialism and theoretical assumptions of the nouveau roman. In the former case, Beckett's decision to write his three novels originally in French and to translate them later 'back' into English is given special attention, and the stress is put on how this helps demonstrate the existential and linguistic crisis of the novel as such. In the latter case, Fowles's original and successfuI attempt to re-write the Victorian noveI from the position of the narrator belonging to the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes is analysed. As a result Fowles's novel can be perceived as an archetypal text in the debate, which had been going on from the Victorian era to the late 1960s when The French Lieutenant's Woman was written, between the specifically British dedication to a realistic mode of writing and French experimentaI 'disruptions'.